Showcase Presents The Atom Volume 1: written by Gardner F. Fox; illustrated by Gil Kane, Sid Greene, and Murphy Anderson (1962-65; collected 2007): DC's Atom of the 1940's was a short guy who could fight well. For the 1960's Silver Age reimagining of the character, size became more of an issue.
Now, thanks to white-dwarf matter, the Atom could shrink. He could also control his mass at any size. This being the Silver Age and not the 1990's, that last bit never resulted in him punching a hole in anyone's head (or collapsing into a miniature black hole).
The smooth and dynamic Gil Kane keeps the art fun and imaginative, even when the adventure simply involves boring bank-robbers or Soviet spies. Ray Palmer, the Silver-Age Atom, was a university professor with a lawyer for a girlfriend. And really, a research professor isn't a bad secret identity for a superhero, especially as Ray seems to be high-powered enough in academia to never have to teach a class!
The best adventures herein play with science fiction, fantasy, and the perennial weirdness of the Silver Age as imagined by writer Gardner Fox. The Atom gets trapped in light bulbs, ironed out as flat as a pancake, and used as the battery for a gun. Thanks to the 'Time Pool,' he also teams up with Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe. It's a full, rich life.
Probably the most emblematic story included here pits the Atom against his own suddenly sentient and malevolent costume. And the revelation of who (or what) is behind the costume's criminal shenanigans makes things even weirder. In an era of comic books in which a benevolent chunk of Kryptonite once narrated a story, anything can happen and probably will. Recommended.
Captain America: Man&Wolf: written by Mark Gruenwald; illustrated by Rik Levins and others (1992-93; Collected 2011): Probably the second-most-maligned Captain America adventure in comic-book history (the first being the Heroes Reborn year of stories), Man&Wolf... really isn't that bad. Mark Gruenwald wrote Captain America for about a decade, and his Cap is always interesting even when the material gets a bit weird.
Pretty much every werewolf or werewolf-like character in the Marvel Universe shows up (the most famous being J. Jonah Jameson's former astronaut son John, cursed to become Man-Wolf by a rock he picked up on the Moon, and Marvel's designated Werewolf, Werewolf by Night; wolf-like characters from X-Force and X-Factor also appear). Someone wants to make more werewolves! A werewolf army! Wolverine shows up too!
And Cap gets turned into a werewolf. But he's a heroic werewolf. The plans of evil will soon be thwarted. Will Cap be cured? Oh, probably. Rik Levins does a nice job on the action sequences, though he struggles with the actual drawing of the werewolves.
A couple of ongoing plot threads that won't be resolved in this collection could probably have been excised so as not to confuse the reader. An Infinity War crossover can't really be excised, but it's damn peculiar anyway. This certainly isn't a high point for Cap, but Gruenwald's version of the character is always fun to hang out with, furry or not. Lightly recommended.
Captain America: Fighting Chance: Denial: written by Mark Gruenwald; illustrated by Dave Hoover and Danny Bulanadi (1994; collected 2009): Collection of a competent six-issue 'half-arc' of Captain America from the early 1990's, when Marvel struggled to compete with upstart Image Comics.
This isn't Gruenwald's best writing on Cap, but it still contains some nice moments as the good Captain learns that his super-soldier formula is starting to fail (again), subjecting him to bouts of paralysis when he exerts himself too much. The revelation of the identity of the secret villain in this mini-arc is underwhelming, to say the least. The art by Hoover and Bulanadi is competent and straightforward. Lightly recommended.
Captain America: The Captain: written by Mark Gruenwald; illustrated by Tom Morgan, Kieron Dwyer, Al Milgrom and others (1987-88; collected 2011): Stripped of his commission as Captain America by the U.S. government, Steve Rogers strives to find his place in the world while the government trains a new Captain America -- the former Super-Patriot -- in his place. The real Cap ends up fighting crime as The Captain for a time before various developments and machinations place him and the new Captain America on a collision course.
This large collection (500 pages+) has its ups and downs, though mostly ups. The late Mark Gruenwald was one of three or four Marvel writers of the 1980's and 1990's who really seemed to "get" Captain America as both an icon and a sympathetic character (for the record, the other writers would be Roger Stern, Mark Waid, and John Byrne, with a special mention of Frank Miller's mournful take on Cap in the Daredevil: Born Again arc). The art by Kieron Dwyer and Tom Morgan is straightforward and effective.
As with DC's Superman, Captain America represents quite a challenge to a comic-book writer. Go too far one way and he's an insufferable, flag-waving goofball. Go too far the other and he's simply not recognizable as Captain America (well, except for that iconic uniform). The Captain allowed Gruenwald to address this problem in an unobtrusively meta-fictional way: Steve Rogers isn't sure what his place is in the world any more, while the new Captain America rapidly becomes a kill-crazy nutjob undone by the stresses of the job. But eventually the narrative shows that the original Captain America still has a place in a world of increasingly violent heroes and villains.
Gruenwald advances his case for a realistically idealistic, principled Captain America in a number of ways: the motley crew of D-List heroes who follow Cap around for much of the book allow for Cap's influence to be shown rather than told; the new Captain America remains fairly sympathetic even as he goes off the rails; and one group of villains actually calls on Cap for help because he's the only Marvel hero who might actually come to the rescue of one group of villains being beat on by another.
All in all, solid superhero storytelling with some nice grace notes scattered throughout. The character of 'D-Man' -- a super-powered former wrestler who fights crime as Demolition Man in what appears to be an oversized Wolverine outfit -- is the most interesting supporting character here, partially because in the Marvel Universe a guy who can deadlift 15 tons is considered puny by a lot of villains, partially because he's an oddity verging on Grant Morrison Doom Patrol territory. Recommended.
